Not wanting to go too overboard and create something we never went and updated, we decided to tie it into Twitter which we all use anyway. Direct Messages fit the bill perfectly as we weren’t too keen on broadcasting the inner workings of Litmus across the internet.

Merb was the framework of choice for this little web app. Using the Twitter Gem to check the direct mail of an account we set up, it then republishes the messages to a page we can all view inside our management app. Merb worked a treat, and we got the app up and running in a couple of hours, a quick style overhaul from Paul and we had the app live and in use from today.

We hooked the app into a Fluid browser and Paul knocked up a little applescript app that posts a direct message to the correct Twitter account.

We’re all really impressed with the result…

The plan is to release this app via Github once it has been cleaned up a bit and properly tested, check back here for details of its release.

I should point out that while we were playing around with this we called it “in/out” (that’s what appears in the screen shot) but obviously the fine people at 37 Signals have already used this name. Therefore our app is known as “Shout”.